USB Audio

In Sound > Preferences you can choose the devices.

My DAC presents itself as a Texas Instruments Benchmark 1.0 USB Audio.

It is available as a ALSA and a OSS device.

When choosing test OSS works, ALSA gives an error

 

After endless Googling, waddling forums, changing permissions, looking in conf files, finally I found the answer:

 

Later I found that there is a nice GUI to end processes too!

 

Pulseaudio

Choose Pulseaudio as the sound device.

Pulseaudio as delivered with Ubuntu is a zero configuration version. Indeed you can't configure anything.

After installing some additional software all output devices are nicely shown.

 

Tried a lot of parameters, spend hours on forums but no sound from the USB.
Looks like Pulseaudio and ALSA don't work together in this case.

Opened the Synaptic Package Manager and removed Pulseaudio completely and now the DAC is playing both OSS and ALSA

 

One advantage of spending hours on all kind of forums.
If Amarok wants a parameter (they don't like list boxes in the Linux world), I know that plughw:1 is my USB DAC